Crossing Our Desk:

- Don’t lie, you missed us just a little bit. Both Mike and Paul were out of the office last week, a rare occurrence that left BitBeat on an unofficial hiatus. What’d we miss?

Not much on the price front. Bitcoin was at $621 a week ago, and it’s at $620 today. What else? Scouring our inbox to catch up on the emails we’d missed, we see that Hustler magazine (yeah, ah, we’d never heard of it, either) announced that it’s accepting bitcoin, and litcoin, and dogecoin, and is offering anybody who uses the digital currencies a “lifetime membership” for $500 (that’s less than one full bitcoin for a lifetime association with this august publication, logophiles). The firm is using GoCoin for processing. “By partnering with GoCoin, our subscribers get extra privacy, and Hustler stays ahead of the curve by accepting new digital currencies,” Larry Flynt said in a press release.

The porn industry has a pretty good track record in terms of adopting promising technologies, actually, so this isn’t as simply prurient as it might seem. A well-regarded paper by Peter Johnson from 1996 – when the talk was of censoring the Internet because, well, it was full of porn – advanced the claim that the industry actually has a long track record of innovating in technology. Pornographers, in their never-ending quest to, well, you know what they’re trying to do, have championed such technologies as photography, paperbacks, VHS, the Internet – even the Italian and English languages. (Paul Vigna)

- The price of bitcoin is naturally a useful tool in assessing bitcoin’s value. That said, it may not necessarily be the best way to measure bitcoin’s value as more than just a currency. Pantera Capital, the San Francisco VC shop, has developed an internal index, the BitIndex, that comprises developer interest, merchant adoption, the hashrate, Google searches and a few other metrics, which it expects will present a fuller, and less volatile, measure of the world of bitcoin.

“Visibility usually means media coverage, public awareness, and, in the case of bitcoin, price and regulation,” the firm wrote. “However, bitcoin’s long-term success is more tied to growth in adoption and to development of applications which encourage both merchants and consumers to want to use bitcoins.”

Here’s a chart of the index since the start of 2012. For the most part, it shows a steady rise:

Pantera Capital

Compare that to this chart of bitcoin prices from CoinDesk:

CoinDesk

In the News:

-The market for bitcoin domain names remains brisk. With Mark Karpales’s bankrupt Mt. Gox planning to auction off the domain name bitcoins.com, and hoping to raise nearly $750,000, it appears the sale is sparking some interest in similar bitcoin-related domains.

The one domain name that wasn’t mentioned, though, was bitcoin.com, the history of which we traced back in April. That name sold for more than $1 million way back in 2011, and has gotten only more valuable since then (the owner remains anonymous; Blockchain.info currently leases it for an undisclosed amount). (Paul Vigna)